Author: Will Harris (Page 123 of 261)

Will is a member of the Television Critics Association and has written for Decider.com, the Onion A.V. Club, The Dissolve, Indiewire, Rhino.com, TV Week Magazine, The Virginian-Pilot, Popdose.com, and EW.com along with writing for Bullz-Eye.com and Premium Hollywood.

TCA Press Tour, Day 4: TBS

July 13, 2008 /

TBS is such a mixed bag of comedy. I’ve become a huge fan of “My Boys” after scoring a review copy of the Season 1 set and blowing through it in about two days, and I’m excited at the prospect of “10 Items or Less” getting a DVD release so I can finally get in on that show from the ground up. But “The Bill Engvall Show” is a little too pedestrian for my tastes (I think Engvall’s a great stand-up, and Tim Meadows never fails to make me laugh, but even his stuff on the show rarely earns more than a light chuckle from me), and to each their own, but if I never see another episode of “House of Payne,” it’ll be too soon. (Reviewing the first DVD release of the show was quite enough of that particular Tyler Perry production for me, thanks.)

Somewhere in the middle of these shows lies “Frank TV.”

I’ve always been a huge fan of impressionists. I mean, I can’t tell you how excited I’d get as a kid when I’d hear that Rich Little was going to be making an appearance on this show or that. Frank Caliendo definitely falls into the tradition of the greats, make no mistake, but despite all the love the guy has received for his spot-on impression of John Madden, he earned a major, major backlash as a result of the absolutely ceaseless promos for “Frank TV” that aired during the baseball playoffs last year.

So how is he going to handle the advertising blitz this time around?

“I’ve actually asked them to tone it up, just to make people angrier.”

In truth, Caliendo didn’t know anything about the constant promoting of his program…though he has already apologized in advance for the fact that it’s almost certainly going to happen again. “It was the weirdest thing in the world,” he said, “because I actually had called over to Steve Koonin and Michael Wright, and I said, ‘What’s happening?’ And they’re, like, ‘It’s working. People are talking about it.’ The thing that you probably don’t know is that — and this is their belief in the show — we had not shot a single sketch before those things aired. So the baseball playoffs were going on with all those promos, they believed in the show and thought it was going to work, but we hadn’t put (together) anything other than a pilot.”

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TCA Press Tour, Day 4: Cartoon Network

July 13, 2008 /

And, of course, by “Cartoon Network,” we really just mean “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

You no doubt saw my non-chronological posting a few days ago, when I just couldn’t wait to praise the full-length episode that Cartoon Network and LucasFilm surprised us with, but I knocked it out so quickly that I didn’t wait to offer up any of post-viewing comments from Dave Filoni, the supervising director of the “Clone Wars” series. I also didn’t mention how downright giddy Filoni was, both before and after the episode, about the mere fact that we were getting to see it!

“I am real excited, and I’m really thrilled that we get to share an episode with you,” he said, prior to its airing. “The secrecy is really top form with ‘Star Wars,’ so this is really exciting for me to share with all of you.” As he said it, I had this vision of George Lucas, sitting in his office, rotating his hand between thumbs-up and thumbs-down, keeping Filoni in suspense as to whether he was going to let us lowly TV critics get a gander at the episode before the diehards down at Comic-Con, but, man, I’m so psyched that he opted to allow it. You may remember (though you probably don’t) how there was a battle last year in mid-panel over ABC wanting to hold onto to purportedly critical “Lost” information and reveal it at Comic-Con rather than during the TCA Press Tour, and many of the critics essentially bullied ABC into giving us the info. I totally didn’t agree with the way that went down, and, frankly, I expected a backlash from shows with a major Comic-Con presence, so I definitely didn’t expect us to score a “Clone Wars” coup.

But we did.

SCORE!

You may have seen a preview for the upcoming animated “Clone Wars” film, but to put things in perspective, the movie is standalone from the series, according to Filone. “It sets up the major characters we know, like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, and the new character, Ahsoka,” he explained, “so it’s made to stand alone and introduce everybody to the universe we’re showing in the ‘The Clone Wars.’ Then you come to the series, which has its small arcs and shows you the war from across a broad spectrum of episodes.”

You could tell the “Star Wars” fans from the non-fans in the audience, with the former camp generally asking the kind of questions that only geeks would care about…like, for instance, how long the series will go on, given that the Clone War has been established as lasting for a specific length of time.

“We’re not just telling Anakin Skywalker’s story,” Filoni reminded us. “If we were doing that, we would be stuck on one single arc. I look at the episodes where we have him and Ahsoka, which is his student, and I know that there is an arc there, because something has to happen to her, since we don’t see her in ‘Revenge of the Sith.’ So we use those kind of points to show the progression of the war. Because we can kind of go left or right of that plot and deal with characters that we have never seen, there’s a lot of material, so I can stretch it and, you know, keep making episodes about things that George would like to see or I would like to see. That’s one of the things I have been amazed at. It’s a three-year period, the Clone War, in the history of the ‘Star Wars’ universe, but in that period, there are so many stories to tell that I’ve been amazed that just in the first season what we didn’t get to, you know, and what I would still like to get to, and what stories we would still like to explore. So for me, the longer it goes, the more chance we all get to tell fascinating stories in that galaxy.”

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TCA Press Tour, Day 4: CNN

July 13, 2008 /

This’ll just be a quick one, since the first of the two panels was about CNN’s coverage of the 2008 Presidential race (this is Premium Hollywood, after all, not Premium Washington), but I wanted to at least briefly touch on Soledad O’Brien’s upcoming two-part special, “Black America,” which explores the milestones and progress made since the assassination of Martin Luther King. In effect, it’s picking up where “Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination” left off in April, and O’Brien discusses potential solutions for the issues and challenges that remain for African-Americans today.

Now, for the most part, I’m planning to save my one-on-one interviews for my return, just because I don’t really have the time to transcribe them while I’m trying to cover all these panels, but I only talked to Ms. O’Brien very briefly, anyway, so I thought I’d go ahead and share it with you right now.

In the middle of the panel, as the topic of a possible Barack Obama presidency came up, Soledad was talking about the reactions of the various black men and and women to how well Obama was doing in the polls, but my ears suddenly pricked up when she casually mentioned how she’d done “a fairly remarkable interview with Bootsy Collins, who said, ‘I
can’t believe the brother is going to do it.'”

Soledad O’Brien and Bootsy Collins? The mind reels…and when I saw her at the Turner Networks party later in the evening, I couldn’t resist asking her about it.

Me: You mentioned Bootsy Collins during the panel…
Soledad: (Grinning) Ah, I love Bootsy Collins!
Me: Well, who doesn’t? But how did he play into the documentary?
Soledad: Well, he’s not in the documentary, but he’s in one of the side pieces that we did in conjunction with the documentary, where we asked him to come in and, really, just talk about his experiences. I mean, Bootsy Collins is an amazing, interesting guy. So he’s not in the documentary, but he’s one of maybe ten different side pieces that I did that’ll appear online about black men over the course of the last 40 years.
Me: Were you a fan of his before? Or at least aware of him before?
Soledad: Yeah! Definitely aware of him before, but a huge fan of him now, because he’s just so…he’s great! And thoughtful, and interesting. Y’know, we had to edit out a lot of… (Starts giggling)
Me: (Laughs) Sorry…? A lot of what?
Soledad: …um, things he was saying that cannot be said online. (Laughs) But he’s really smart and thoughtful. He was great.

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TCA Press Tour, Day 3: HBO

July 13, 2008 /

Okay, kids, we’ve got a lot of stuff to cover here, so let’s start off by just hitting the highlights of the initial HBO panel, which was simply the network’s programming group president Richard Plepler and co-president Michael Lombardo opening up the floor to questions.

* The next season of “Big Love” is shooting now and will hopefully land on the air in the first quarter of 2009.

* Larry David is currently filming a Woody Allen movie, but he’s planning to get back to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” once he’s finished with that, so fingers crossed for Season 7 in late 2009.

* There are six completed episodes of Linda Bloodworth-Thomas’s “12 Miles of Bad Road” floating around, but HBO has decided that the series isn’t right for them, so it’s anyone’s guess if, when, or where we’ll ever see it.

* There is enormous interest by Warner Bros./New Line to do another “Sex and the City” movie, and they’re trying with HBO’s help to put that together.

* David Chase is on vacation in France, but if he wants to do a “Sopranos” movie, HBO would be “delighted to explore that.”

* Pilots have been greenlit for “Treme,” dealing with post-Katrina New Orleans, “The Washingtonian,” based on a Jessica Cutler book, and one-hour drama about 1920s Atlantic City that’s written and executive-produced by Terry Winter, with Martin Scorsese also executive-producing.

* David Milch is working on a pilot called “Last of the Ninth” about New York City Police Department in the 1970s, which means that the likelihood of a “Deadwood” movie happening is slim to none.

* Both “In Treatment” and “Tell Me You Love Me” will be returning.

* The network’s upcoming miniseries, “Pacific Theater,” executive-produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman, just wrapped principal photography, and should air in either late ’09 or early ’10.

* Coming soon: “Number One Lady Detective,” based on the series of books by Alexander McCall Smith.

* Also coming soon: “Hung,” a half-hour comedy with Alexander Payne directing.

* Chris Rock will be doing his fifth HBO concert on September 27, 2008.

So there you go. Not a bad slate of stuff to keep you looking forward to for the next several months…and that’s not even counting the shows that earned their own panels.

First up: Ricky Gervais.

Though many Americans remain unaware of this fact, Gervais has stretched his career beyond television and film into the world of stand-up comedy. (His possession of the ability to do hilarious stand-up will come as no surprise to anyone who’s become addicted to the podcasts he’s done with his longtime writing partner, Stephen Merchant, and their associate, the inexplicable Mr. Karl Pilkington.) There are actually three DVDs worth of Gervais’ stand-up available in the UK – “Animals,” “Politics,” and “Fame” – but, to date, his Stateside fans have been given little opportunity outside of YouTube to investigate his facet of his work. Thankfully, HBO stands ready to change this by filming his performance next week at the Wamu Theater at Madison Square Garden, for air in the very near future. (The venue, according to Gervais was chosen because “I’ve just bought an apartment right near it, so I can walk.”)

Despite being one of the most distinctively British comedians working today, Gervais assured us that he won’t really have to change a great deal in his act for American audiences. “I obviously take out cultural references you wouldn’t get,” he admitted, “but I think it’s as simple as changing sort of stones for pounds. There’s nothing that I think an American audience wouldn’t like. It’s purely cultural references that might not be mutual. The things I pick on are probably global…and, you know, America, by its definition in the world, is pretty global, anyway. It’s a huge part of the world. Particularly the English-speaking world. I pick on the comedy classics. You know, Hitler, famine…

“What I do is, I have a bag of observations that I think might be funny, and I jot them down. I probably start with about half an hour, and that becomes an hour, and the other half an hour is sort of ad-libs and additions over the course of a
tour. The audience chooses the best bits for you. It’s a process of natural selection. So over a hundred dates, they’ve chosen your best hour. You thought it up and you said it, but they’ve sort of done the difficult bit for you.”

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Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External TV, News, TCA Blog 2008, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Action, TV Comedies, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

TCA Press Tour, Day 3: Sundance Channel

July 12, 2008 /

So here’s the thing about the Sundance Channel’s presentations: there were two of them…and I cared a lot more about one of them than I did the other. I mean, I actually felt bad for the first panel, “Architectural School,” because I don’t think I took in a single word that was uttered while it was going on. I was pretty much exclusively focused on repeating the same mantra over and over again:

“Elvis Costello is next, Elvis Costello is next, Elvis Costello is next, Elvis Costello is next, Elvis Costello is next…”

I know: it’s rude, and I’m sorry. But in an act of apology, I should say that, unlike most of the programs I’ve been talking about thus far, I actually did have a chance to screen the first two episodes of “Architecture School,” and I even wrote about them after viewing them.

The first thing that strikes you about this series, which focuses on fourth-year students at Tulane University’s School of Architecture as they design and build an affordable house to be sold to a needy New Orleans homebuyer, is that, finally, the TV spotlight has been put on some young adults who should be spotlighted. You’d never find a show like this on a network that actually caters to the youth of today, of course, but you can at least hope that the cool kids find it. But while “Architecture School” is extremely interesting on an intellectual level as each of the students work out their visions (watching one of them try to pitch the validity of a 3-story house in the middle of Nawlins is pretty funny), it would be overstating things to suggest that it’s truly enthralling. God forbid they should dumb it down in the slightest, but here’s hoping the series begins to move a bit more quickly as the students get out of the classroom and into the actual building process.

So there you go. Not necessarily a rave, but there’s some praise there, at least. Now I feel a little bit better about being completely out of it during the show’s panel…and now we can go ahead and talk about “Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…”

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